The Racist History of Telephone Poles

Caira Wynn Blackwell
9 min readJul 16, 2019

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The first telephone pole to be erected was done so in 1844 by a man named Samuel Morse, who had been compensated by the U.S. Congress to send messages more quickly from one destination to another. True to task, Morse sent the first telegraph from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore and back with the message “What hath God wrought?” in Morse Code. After such success, telephones became staples in the houses of upper to middle class white families. This meant that poles were rising up from the ground by the thousands on both coasts, a fact that angered many.

According to Eula Biss’s “Time and Distance Overcome,” anywhere a telephone pole was set to be put up, there were homeowners and business owners ready to saw them right back down. It was what the New York Times called a “War on Telephone Poles” in 1889. They didn’t want them because they were ugly, a nuisance to the eye that seemed to grow from the ground in a misshapen, barren kind of way, a tree born dead that sprouted multitudes of warped, deranged limbs that stretched beyond any distances than were ever before imaginable. Biss also comments on the deeper issue that the poles brought about: this age-old American fear for “private property and a reluctance to surrender it to a shared utility.” Americans, in the rise of the telephone poles, were not strictly fighting for the aesthetics of their country, but for the ideology that collectivity was the downfall of the American way.

However, the pushback against invention was no match for the novelty of the invention itself, and by the turn of the century, there were more telephones than bathtubs in America. Any town with a population exceeding one hundred thousand people was connected through telephone poles, the green-less trees risen and strung, a wire for each telephone. Thomas Edison said that telephones eliminated “time and space, and brought the human family in closer touch.” Which is true, in a sense.

Emily Ann Thompson’s The Soundscapes of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America talks about the literal acoustics of the first telephones. In this book, Thompson tells her reader how, when two people talk to each other face-to-face, the distance between them very literally warps in transit from speaker to listener. The acoustics of the space around two people talking, as well as the distance between them, changes not only the volume, but the quality of the sound as well. But, when the first telephones came about, they virtually eliminated the distance aspect of this physical conversational property. A person would speak into the transmitter of the phone, and it would shoot directly to the listener’s receiver as if no distance existed at all. The level of intimacy of the first telephone was like that of two lovers whispering into each other’s ears. But, this element of nearness backfired when the space around the wires of the telephone poles were disturbed enough to transmit through the calls. “When the sound of that space did intrude…it was perceived as an unwanted noise.” This was a trivial misfortune to those affluent enough to own telephones, but a grave tragedy to the human beings intruding on that space in the sky: the hanging Black bodies, the unwanted noise of their strangulation vibrating through the wires.

Early telephone calls were full of noise. “Such a jangle of meaningless noises had never been heard by human ears,’ Herbert Casson wrote in his 1910 History of the Telephone. “There were the rustling of leaves, the croaking of frogs, the hissing of steam, the flapping of birds’ wings….There were spluttering and bubbling, jerking and rasping, whistling and screaming…”

This was the anomaly of the public opinion of utilitarianism: it was hated when it encroached upon private property, but when used against the Black body, it was celebrated. Suddenly, telephone poles were not bad for those who couldn’t even afford telephones, because they could use the poles themselves to punish, torture, murder, and warn the Black populations.

Seventeen-year-old Jesse Washington was hanged in Waco, Texas from a telephone poll after having been beaten, castrated, had his ears and fingers cut off, and burned alive. A postcard (one of many) was sent out with a picture of the burned, lynched victim reading: “this is the barbecue we had last night.” These kinds of instances happened all over the country, from telephone poles used as a battering ram to break into a jail and lynch a Black man being held there for killing a police officer, to being used like exhibits to showcase the latest victims of racial terror.

In February of 1910, a man by the name of Allen Brooks was accused of attempting to rape a two-year-old white girl in Dallas, Texas. In early March, his jail cell was stormed, he was dragged — very literally, with a rope around his neck — for half a mile through the streets before being hanged from a telephone pole in a popular intersection downtown. A postcard was made of the spectacle, capturing only a fraction of the five thousand people who had gathered to watch. It is significant to note the individuals in the crowds, as there were not only angry white men who occupied the spaces of lynching’s. No, in the foreground of the postcard of Allen Brooks’s death, two young boys stare the camera down. A third child, a little girl, stands in front of them, her back to the boys as she takes part as witness to the brutal death of a man. Only a few steps to the left of her stands another man, a hand gripping his bike as if he was only there in passing, his focus on the camera behind as well. His eyes, unlike the rest of the spectators watching, are haunted. He, a Black man, is immortalized as the figure among thousands whose horrified eyes seem to echo that same question Morse sent with his first telegraph: what has God done? Only, it is clear that the lynching of Allen Brooks on that telephone pole was not the work of God. Man did that, and never reaped what he sowed.

…they are ours. We made them.
See here, where the cleats of linemen
Have roughened a second bark
Onto the bald trunk. And these spikes
Have been driven sideways at intervals handy for human legs.
The Nature of our construction is in every way
A better fit than the Nature it displaces
What other tree can you climb where the birds’ twitter,
Unscrambled, is English? True, their thin shade is negligible,
But then again there is not that tragic autumnal
Casting-off of leaves to outface annually.
These giants are more constant than evergreens
By being never green.

— Telephone Poles and Other Poems by John Updike, 1963

John Updike wrote the above poem no more than a decade after the worst hangings America had seen. He celebrates the man-made devices that are telephone poles. It is strange, that he applauds these structures for being barren, comparing them to trees that never have to lose their luster in winter because they never had any to begin with. But, in a way, they did. The Black bodies that hung from their trunks were strange fruits too ripe to bear. Their leaves never existed to turn colors in the first place, but the bodies that hung and then dropped from their spikes made shedding telephone poles the most unfortunate Fall of all.

When people look at telephone poles today, it’s highly unlikely that they think of the terror for which they were used. Why would they? As a country, America has in no way taken steps to remember and heal the pain that has been caused by the culture of lynching, especially not those done specifically on telephone poles. Though there are hundreds of memorials across the country that celebrates the defenders of slavery, Americans are not so enthusiastic to recognize the former slaves who were terrorized under their control.

Black people in America have a history of being buried in unmarked graves — especially those who were victims of terrorism. An organization called the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) is the first program in the States to actively build a national memorial for victims of lynching. There is currently no monument in the country which seeks to memorialize those murdered in the name of racial terror, even though there have been four thousand documented lynchings between the years 1877 and 1950. Martha Minow, Dean of Harvard Law School, wrote in her book Between Vengence and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence, that recognizing the cruel acts done against People of Color is crucial to the healing process of the nation. Minow says that “failure to take such steps would most likely convey that individuals and their pain do not matter.” Creating a space which acknowledges the injustices against Black Americans is just the first large step in the change that needs to be made on this stolen soil.

The road to recovery for the American people is a long one in the making, not only because of the depth and darkness of the history we carry, but also because it has never only stayed buried in the past. Our ugly prejudices and practices have bled through the fabric of our nation’s well-tailored suit to affect our lives to this day. Telephone poles, large staples in our lives most people barely take notice of, are directly symbolic of this unhealthy erasure.

An effort to change the way that we choose to view how our collective past mingles with the present is desperately needed in this country. One way this might be possible is through the intense lens of language. In an article called “Does Language Shape the Way You Think?” by Guy Deutscher from the New York Times, Deutscher breaks down the relevance language has on our tendency to think in a certain manner. He says that a native language makes us think about specific things in our realities. In turn, one language “routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, which forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience” that another may not.

Deutscher gave the example of a language called Guugu Yimithirr, which is special in that it doesn’t use egocentric coordinates like many languages around the globe do. For instance, instead of saying “turn left,” native Guugu Yimithirr speakers would say “go westward,” relying solely on cardinal directions to navigate the world. This is significant because it was found that native speakers of this tongue developed certain habits of the mind “because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all the time.” Since speakers of Guugu Yimithirr must always know the cardinal directions at all times, it was discovered that they have an “almost-superhuman sense of orientation…a habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated from infancy.”

So, what does this mean for Americans and our troubled past? Clearly these traits of Guugu Yimithirr speakers are those that are learned from birth, not taught midway through life. But, the Guugu Yimithirr language can educate on a valuable lesson post-colonial societies should be hard pressed to learn: the way that we speak, from sentence formation in the mind to vocal interpersonal interactions on a day-to-day basis, influences the way that we view the world. As Americans, we need to cultivate a language that is more aware of its nation’s culture, from the tragedies to the triumphs.

The New York Times called the people’s hostility toward telephone poles “The War on Telephone Poles” in 1889. It was the wrong war to be fought. Individuals were angry that unsightly, leafless trees were being erected across the entire country, connecting people in ways that never before seemed possible. What should have upset them was that these connections between people totally excluded the Black masses in this country. It should have infuriated them that the lines of communications between people were so heavily disturbed, and, even more deranged, joined by people’s inexplicable urge to mangle, dismantle, and oppress the Black body. Worse, that these acts were committed, and then oh-so-fluidly forgotten, even though the markers of these graves still stand to this very day.

This is the work of a country too afraid of its past to speak its truth. America has very literally choked up the lines of honest communication because it has since only been interested in sweeping over the uncomfortable, horrible parts of its history. Maybe a step in the right direction toward restorative justice, toward growing a nation of people who see each other as human beings, is to start changing the way that we speak to each other, and, in turn, alter the way that we see each other, too. What better way to start such a process, than by the thousands of miles of wire linking this country together, all held up by the wooden giants, those marked graves, that remain never green?

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Caira Wynn Blackwell

Caira W. Blackwell has been published in RaceBaitr, The Knockturnal, Nylon, Confluence, and Okayplayer, and has a published novel on Amazon.